Understanding Gen Z Protests in the Context of Africa’s G20 Year

Ashraf Patel

South Africa initiated its ‘African G20’ amid the most tumultuous geopolitical and geoeconomic disruptions. Earlier this year, Trump 2.0's big bang’ trade wars and massive cuts in Development aid by the US and EU have seen a sudden, abrupt cut-offs of Aid programs, posing huge problems for nations' ability to allocate resources. In the past few weeks, the mushrooming of Gen Z protests, which find their discontents in the economic–governance crisis, has put the spotlight on the G20's relevance and prospects for success. 

Are these Gen Z protests merely flashpoints or do they signify deeper structural questions in a post-COVID new nationalism era?  

While there are shades of yesteryears Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring's pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East, the 2024-25  Gen Z protests come at a time of post-COVID dystopian nationalist world, where tectonic shifts in geopolitics and multipolarity, and where the G20 globalisation model is under severe scrutiny. 

As so often, these protests sparked with a spark.  When police in Tunisia pushed vendor Karim Al Bouzzizi off the street, he set himself on fire, sparking the Arab Spring. In 2024,  the Bangladesh government reinstated a quota system that awarded the descendants of “freedom fighters” –  the people who liberated Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 – a shocking 30 percent of these highly coveted government jobs.

His dreams were dashed. In a nation where a youth bulge forms the bulk of the population, and yet 18 million unemployed young people in Bangladesh at the moment, a countrywide movement to reform the quota system, which came to be known as “Students Against Discrimination,” mushroomed and, within weeks, toppled the authoritarian Hasina regime in Dhaka. Kenya’s cost-of-living crisis was sparked by the VAT increase that mushroomed into food riots, where over 600 lives were lost in 2024.    

Similarly, Morocco’s sudden Gen Z protests have their roots in large-scale youth discontent, and with over 35% of youth unemployment in the context of tough new  EU immigration policies, as well as the lack of spillovers from large spectacular projects in preparation for the FIFA World Cup 2030.

This underscores the lack of inclusion and skills for the new economy. The old gerontocracy remains entrenched, with the same features of the Arab Spring remaining.  ‘Foreover Authoritarian systems’ are entrenched features in North Africa and Southeast Asia. 

Similarly year later in  Nepal where a wave of protests mushroomed around a sudden social media ban that mushroomed in demands by youth and middle classes for an end of the geriatric elite with the storming of the palace, parliament and homes of top brass,  exposing vast gulfs between a top 10% in these societies and than educated class with young the nowhere to go and nothing to do.

The sudden Gen Z protests in Madagascar have their roots in its dysfunctional political economy and new geopolitical contestations, but underlying issues of unemployment and poverty are persistent. 

According to William Shoki of African is a Country: 

“To treat this as a generational drama—Gen Z against their elders—is to depoliticize it. The category “Gen Z” belongs to the marketing lexicon of late capitalism, not to the vocabulary of historical change. It suggests that what unites these young people is culture or attitude rather than material circumstance. But their shared predicament is not psychological. It is structural. The same debt-driven economies, privatized social services, and externally imposed austerity programs that defined the neoliberal era have now reached their political limit” ( Africa is a Country, 6  October 2025 ) 

African nations face a dire Debt crisis with the highest cost of capital, which means even more hurdles to meeting the UN SDGs. In the recent G20   town hall meeting in KZN, 

“We’re having a developmental crisis in Africa and in other emerging economies as much as we are having a debt problem. This is our biggest challenge, and in the form of the G20, we’ve then had the common framework, but only about two countries have participated or applied for debt restructuring under the common framework, which are Zambia and Ghana,” Ntshwanti said.

Ironically, SA hosts the G20 in a year of its VAT crisis, a mega student debt, and deep cuts in education and school feeding programs on top of 1% GDP. 

What is clear is that a new ideological content of the movements is cohering around common themes. The phenomenon of Jobless growth in traditional sectors such as mining and large construction projects, as well as the mechanisation of precarious productive processes, enabled by super-efficient AI, has marginalised labour. This is G20’s best export – FDI and Jobless Growth!

Shokti further unpacks 

Those movements revealed the limits of neoliberal democracy but were ultimately contained by it. The deferred revolution was not extinguished; it was dispersed. The events of 2025 suggest that the energy of that cycle is returning, shaped by harsher economic conditions and stripped of earlier illusions about reform. If the 2010s were a decade of revolt without revolution—of uprisings that exposed the system’s failures without transcending them—then today’s unrest is a politics of necessity: not yet revolutionary, but born of the realization that mere survival now demands confrontation with the system itself ( Shokti, October 2025 ) 

Reskilling and training systems and programs are insufficient. The global digital economy and precarity of Gig work have left millions toiling in exploitative conditions, though their job tasks serve global Big Tech giants who reap billions in profit per quarter.

Without guardrails and a social compact, these Gen Z protests can mushroom and deepen. Whatever the outcome,  they’re shaping a bold new defiant politics with the youth generation ever more confident, agile, and tech-savvy to the narrative and shaping the future in the bold new World.

Gen Z protestors- unlike strikes of the old industrial era are tech savvy, using apps from privacy apps to GIS mapping to private VPNs, all feature prominently in real-time social media mass at flashpoints. 

They deploy these tools of the trade to demand more access and participation in the digital economy. The key question is whether they seek ‘inclusion in the current system’ or seek to radically change it. Revolution or co-option? Is another world possible? 

* Ashraf Patel is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Global Dialogue, UNISA.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.